Introduction

This is the home web page of Arthur Hu which has been around in some
form since 1995, so this is one of the older websites around.

I'm an American-Born Chinese (ABC some call that) which the Chinese
called first generation, but the Japanese would call Nisei or second
generation.
My father John Ta-Chuan Hu was from Hupei province. He was one of the
first Chinese to go China's western-style college to study chemistry.
His "back in my day story I had to walk in the snow uphill both ways"
was having to walk halfway across china before they had trains or
airliners. He got there just in time for finals, but he says he got
the top score anyways. He helped to move the campus to stay out of the
way of invading Japanese troops in the Sino-Japanese / WWII. He got to
watch the bombers fly over and bomb nearby Chunking. After the war, he
was assigned to help run the fertilizer factory that the Japanese were
kind enough to leave behind on Taiwan. He got a scholarship to a university
in Cincinati, but he eventually made his way to USC in Los Angeles where
he nearly completed his PhD.
My mother Betty came from a well to do family with a large house with
a big courtyard, now an apartment block in Schezuan province. Her
father was a Nationalist government official who contemplated staying
behind to fight the communists in a guerilla action, but thought
better of it and took about the last plane out of Shanghai. She got a
scholarship to Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles before they got
so progressive they broke off from the mother Catholic church and
eventually closed down. I saw her report card which said she actually
took a college level course in homemaking.
At that time there were only a handful of students from China in the
US who had actually stepped off a boat which had staterooms for
travelers on cargo vessels, if I recall they actually came ashore in
Vancouver BC, arriving in the late 1950s. They had me towards the end
of the 1950s, but my mother contined her studies as a mother, and had
another by the time she graduated. Eventually we had 6 brothers and 1
sister named from A to G.

Dad eventually did research that established that Seattle was the
place to be to get away from smog and earthquakes, and we settled in a
suburb of Seattle during the Boeing boom days of the 1960s and the
bust days of the 1970s. Airplanes were lined up wingtip to wingtip all the
way down Renton field and we could hear the roar of money when they
delivered planes.

My parent's idea of the American Dream was sending all 7 kids (who all
played violin) as the original tiger parents to MIT and Stanford. That's a
feat which the next generation isn't going to repeat, but in our day
then we didn't have the internet or mobile phones or openGL.

My day job is usually software engineer or software engineer in test
in some Microsoft (TM) technology such as Windows / .NET / Windows
mobile. I started in high school with a desktop HP9830 BASIC computer with a
plotter. I figured out 3D perspective from scratch in high school
before colleges even offered course in graphics. I was turned down by Harvard,
wait listed to Caltech, accepted to Stanford but college at MIT.

I've worked for a number of computer and software companies including
Hewlett Packard, Digital Equipment, Autodesk, Microsoft, and Intel
over the years in Boston, Silicon Valley, Boise, Portland and my home
town of Seattle, and lately weathered the winters of Rochester Minnesota.

I was the one that was concertmaster of the Thalia youth symphony and in
Vilem Sokol's Seattle Youth Symphony "1812" film, and concertmaster at MIT
(well my other brother was concertmaster at Stanford..) My dad gave me a
really nice violin he picked up at a pawn shop for $50, and the world's worst
guitar for the PBS Frederick Noad classical guitar and the parks program
folk guitar, which I've carried to Catholic and now Contemporay Christian
music, and around Rochester I've joined the bunch of people who hang around
the medical clinic piano either singing or playing streetcorner style songs.

It's mostly the other stuff I get into that's on my web pages.

I've got a pretty good web presence on my various sites for a user who isn't viral yet:

Every statistic ever gathered on Asian Americans and every other kind of diversity in one place. Not all of the data is on line yet, but you can email arthurhu@halcyon.com if what you're looking for isn't in the index. Not neccesarily politically correct, but that's the facts.

Here are the most popular pages May 2008, it's still mostly in
the same order: